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But Joseph W. Kufari and his team refused to release certain documents and tried to block interviews, effectively stalling this investigation, which has now stretched more than 15 months and turned into a wide-ranging investigation into more than a dozen allegations of misconduct raised from whistleblowers and other sources, according to three people familiar with the case who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an open investigation.
That investigation does not yet include an investigation into the missing Secret Service texts, which are instead the subject of multiple congressional investigations.
Some Republican senators also voiced staunch opposition to the broader Cuffari investigation — which is being overseen by a panel of federal watchdogs from Council of Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) – Questions Need for Full Investigation of Trump Administration appointed.
Led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), the senators asked investigators to scale back requests for records from Cuffari’s office and pressed them about their motives, according to congressional aides and documents.
Kuffari and his team have complained to senators about a politically motivated fishing expedition designed to undermine him, according to sources familiar with the investigation and congressional aides. In writing in response to questions from House lawmakers last summer, Kufari said the investigation would “destroy” his office. He accused investigators of “undermining my efforts to clear the DHS OIG.”
A spokeswoman for Cuffari declined to comment.
A person close to the process described a “war of attrition” between Cuffari and the panel known as the Integrity Committee overseeing the investigation, undermining oversight designed to hold inspectors general to the same standards as the federal agency employees they oversee.
“Watchdogs have to meet the highest standards if they’re going to be credible,” said Nick Schuelenbach, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight, which advocates for a stronger federal surveillance system and last week called on Biden to fire Kuffari. “There’s a pattern to Cuffari that resists the kind of oversight that other federal employees face.”
A spokeswoman for the inspector general’s community declined to comment. But former guards said they never saw a colleague investigated looking for guerilla allies to protect them to the extent that Kufari has.
“I’ve never heard of members of Congress trying to intrude in any way on an investigation,” recalled Michael Bromich, a former Justice Department inspector general from 1994 to 1999 who himself was investigated by the panel. for integrity.
“It will give investigators pause,” Bromwich said. “An already slow process will be further slowed by the interest of members of Congress whose actions will throw sand into the gears.”
During his three years at Homeland Security, Kufari has repeatedly faced accusations of partisan decision-making in his role as watchdog at the third-largest federal agency. Most recently, he has come under scrutiny over his office’s decision to block his officials from retrieving communications between Secret Service agents during the riot.
House Democrats last week called on Kufari to recuse himself from their investigation into the missing Secret Service communications, a demand he has so far refused to heed. The Washington Post reported last week that an unreleased 2013 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general found that Kufari misled investigators and “violated” ethics regulations while in charge of the agency’s Tucson field office. Kufari said he was fully vetted by the FBI, the White House and the Senate during the nomination process.
Those missteps increased pressure on Biden, who promised during his campaign that he would respect the independence of monitors after former President Donald Trump fired multiple inspectors general.
Last week, Biden’s spokeswoman said the president had no immediate plans to fire Kuffari.
“The president has been very clear … that he believes in the independent role of inspectors general and that they perform an important function in providing accountability to the American people,” White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre said. “That still stands. He believes in it.
Presidents have traditionally been cautious about firing federal guards, many of them serve long terms that span administrations. Trump upended that tradition by firing four inspectors general in less than two months.
CIGIE’s investigation into Cuffari began early last year from his own An integrity committee that includes four guards, representatives from the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics, and a small support staff. The panel screens thousands of complaints each year about alleged wrongdoing by inspectors general. Cuffari’s is one of four investigations opened in fiscal year 2021, according to CIGIE records.
Among the topics of Cuffari’s investigation, which is being conducted by investigators from the office of Transportation Department Inspector General Eric Soskin, are whether he retaliated against senior career officials in his office who raised concerns about his qualifications for the job in 2018 and early 2019, according to sources familiar with the investigation. Soskin’s office declined to comment.
Kuffari and those employees he subsequently fired have separately pressed the integrity commission to investigate each other. Suitcases engaged law firm WilmerHale to conduct an independent investigation into those employees’ allegations, paying the firm about $1.4 million. WilmerHale concluded in his report that his detractors had tried to derail his nomination.
It is not clear if Soskin’s staff is addressing allegations of partisan decision-making. Kuffari declined to scrutinize the Secret Service’s handling of the 2020 George Floyd protests in Lafayette Square, the agency’s spread of the coronavirus and the Border Patrol’s treatment of Haitian migrants during the influx in Del Rio, Texas, among others politically sensitive issues.
During the panel’s investigation, Cuffari resisted allowing the questioning of witnesses and turning over some documents to investigators, in some cases claiming attorney-client privilege, according to people familiar with his actions.
Meanwhile, Hawley and other GOP senators have accused leaders in the inspector general community of not cooperating with WilmerHale’s lawyers who have requested their testimony. The guards face questions about the scope of other investigations by the Integrity Committee and standard oversight practices.
In a letter to Soskin in March signed by Hawley and Republican Senators Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), James Lankford (Oklahoma), Mitt Romney (Utah), Rob Portman (Ohio) and Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), the lawmakers accused the inspector general’s staff of seeking “ protected whistleblower communications’ in the Cuffari investigation. The letter, obtained by The Post, said Soskin sought an “extremely broad set of communications and documents” from Kufari’s office and warned him that he could be interfering with congressional oversight. The senators wrote that “overbroad requests for documents and materials from the inspector general’s office” could distract him from his mission to investigate waste, fraud and abuse.
A separate letter sent by Hawley to Soskin around the same time, the contents of which were described to The Post by a person familiar with the matter, alleged that Kufari’s office had been bombarded with requests for documents, making it difficult for his office to carry out its regular supervisory work.
In light of Kufari’s case, a prominent former watchdog, Glenn Fine, called this week for term limits on inspectors general and a faster mechanism to investigate those accused of wrongdoing. Fine said the president should have the freedom to fire an inspector general for poor performance, not just misconduct.
In an article for the Brookings Institution think tank, Fine — who was fired by Trump as an acting guard at the Defense Department in 2020 — called on Congress to give the inspector general community a budget to hire its own staff to investigate colleagues accused of misconduct.
“There is very little [inspectors general] who don’t do a good job,” Fine said in an interview. “If someone is not performing well and providing effective leadership, there should be a way to assess that in a non-partisan way.”
Under the current system, he said, “a year or more goes by while the president is waiting for an investigation, and during that time there can be a lot of dysfunction in the office.”
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